Saturday, January 7, 2012

The Sting of the Manticore

So it's been about a week now, I have new projects to keep me occupied in the absence of maps. For example, a secret writing project I've referred to only as The Mars Thing. I give it this bland name because I'm very superstitious about naming my literary works. Whenever I think of a cool sounding name for something I'm working on it almost never gets finished. I attribute this to a gypsy curse and I blame it for why my previous magnum opus Dr. Donovan Slate: Man of Steel or The Claws of Doom: The Illustrated History of the Killbots haven't been picked up by a publisher yet.

Either way, the Mars thing will be a great, with lots of hard science fact and outrageous predictions of fashion trends in the late 21st Century. I'm telling you people, beehive hairdos are making a comeback in 2084, just you wait and see!

Thankfully my life hasn't been completely consumed by my quest to be the next Kilgore Trout, not yet at least. I've also been hard at work making my own homebrew tabletop RPG system. If all goes well, it will be both elegantly simple enough to fit all the rules onto a notecard and versatile enough to run any campaign in any setting (including My Little Pony). Plus, every dice roll will be made with the common d6, as in the dice used in Monopoly or in the alley behind the liquor store.

Progress has been slow so far, mainly because I've never played a tabletop game myself and have no idea how they're supposed to work. So far, I've only managed to get a small test campaign with my sister running. The plot, such as it is, is that she needs to deliver a TPS report to her boss who happens to be an evil wizard. Results aren't looking so good, we haven't even bothered to follow the rules I've worked on and both times she's died when she's confronted the aforementioned wizard. But you can't stop progress and by Jove, I'll make millions off this idea yet!

Speaking of which, I've been antiquing again. As I've already told Idontknow, I've struck figurative gold. One of the local antique stores has a venerable gold mine of god awful album covers, several of which have already appeared here. It really must be seen to be believed, there's no way to describe seeing the likes of Yes, Focus and even Thomas Dolby in one place. With the possible exception of "hideous". But all that's dwarfed in comparison to the crowning achievement of the trip, I've found a copy of the Tarkus album by none other then Emerson, Lake & Palmer.

Look at that, imagine that sitting on my desk right now. Because that is exactly what it is doing. It's glorious (if a bit water damaged) and comes complete with the inner sleeve depicting Tarkus doing battle with several other baffling cybernetic animals. Sure, I don't have a record player and therefore can't listen to it. But hey, it's not like I could already listen to the whole song on Youtube already...

...except that I could. I still don't regret my purchase.

As far as I'm concerned Tarkus is now the official mascot of my blog, seeing as how he's referenced to almost as much as the Daleks.

For more predictions of fashion to come in the world of tomorrow, be sure to check out Tales From Future Past.